It is well known that Bertolt Brecht, during his time in the United States of America, attracted the surveillance of anti-communist forces, with Brecht's sly testimony to the House Committee on Un-American Activities becoming one of his most famous public performances. Recently declassified files from Her Majesty's Government reveal that Britain, too, undertook extensive campaigns to monitor and censor Brecht and the Berliner Ensemble. James Smith considers material from British governmental agencies such as MI5, the Foreign Office, and the Cabinet Office, which detail the activities undertaken by the British government concerning Brecht and the Ensemble. Such activities took the form not only of monitoring Brecht and his circle, both in Britain and overseas, but also of active attempts to block the visits of Brecht and the Ensemble, and to pressure theatre festivals and promoters into refusing to facilitate tours. The issue of the Berliner Ensemble caused debates at the highest levels of Whitehall, influencing the delicate area of British and NATO policy regarding the diplomatic status of East Germany during the Cold War. James Smith has completed a doctoral dissertation at Cambridge examining the influence of Brecht on British theatre. He currently teaches modern drama in the Faculty of Education and at Homerton College, Cambridge.

The appeal of the puppet lies partly in its dual nature: it is at once a representative object without life while at the same time it enacts the imagined life with which it is endowed by the puppeteer. Marie Kruger argues that this duality makes puppetry a uniquely effective way of questioning the very traditional values it appears to embody, and so of stimulating a sense of the need for social change. She relates her argument to the long tradition of puppetry among the Bamana people of Mali, and specifically to the performance of the Bin Sogo bo, an animal masquerade in which the ‘characters’ adumbrate human qualities with effective ambiguity. Marie Kruger is Chair of the Department of Drama at the University of Stellenbosch, South Africa, where puppetry is offered as a performance option. She is the author of Puppetry: a Guide for Beginners and has also published in the South Africa Theatre Journal. Over the past twenty years she has directed numerous puppet productions for all ages, and is currently leading a research project to document the nature and application of African puppet traditions.

The fictionalized account in the recent film The Queen of Tony Blair's coaching of Her Majesty into a more voter-friendly response to the death of Princess Diana, largely through the medium of television, is a pertinent reminder of how the presentation of self on television subtly modifies the presentation of self in everyday life. In this article, Ian Watson considers how the now-ritualized debates between the main contenders in American presidential elections are stage-managed to enhance what their supporters suppose to be their candidate's most sympathetic features – supposedly learning the lessons of the first such debate, between John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon, which displayed Nixon in such an unappealing light. However, what are ostensibly strengths or weaknesses may be read as quite other by an audience attuned to reading signifiers in film or television drama – or simply empathic towards what others perceive as failings, as in the case of reactions to George W. Bush's inarticulacies, awkward mannerisms, and failed jokes, which some read not as signs of ineptness but of an endearing humanity. Ian Watson, who is a Contributing Editor of New Theatre Quarterly, teaches at Rutgers University, Newark, where he is the Acting Chair of the Department of Visual and Performing Arts. He is author of Towards a Third Theatre: Eugenio Barba and the Odin Teatret (Routledge, 1993) and of Negotiating Cultures: Eugenio Barba and the Intercultural Debate (Manchester University Press, 2002). He edited Performer Training across Cultures (Routledge, 2001), and has published numerous articles on theatre in scholarly journals.

Martin Crimp is one of the most exciting British playwrights to have emerged since the 1980s: his work is characterized by its vision of contemporary society as a place of social decay, moral compromise, and barely suppressed violence. He is also a writer whose work engages with both British and European theatre traditions. He started his career in 1981 at the Orange Tree Theatre, a fringe venue in Richmond, and this theatre produced all his early work, including Dealing with Clair and Play with Repeats. But it was when he became a Royal Court playwright in 1990, with No One Sees the Video, that he achieved international success and recognition. Three plays in particular – The Treatment, Attempts on Her Life and The Country – have become recognized masterpieces. Crimp has also pursued a parallel career as a translator and adapter of classics such as Molière's The Misanthrope and Sophocles' The Women of Trachis (as Cruel and Tender). The interview with Aleks Sierz which follows is assembled from conversations with Martin Crimp in London during February and March 2006, and the NTQ Checklist of Crimp's work on page 361 is derived from materials assembled by Sierz for his forthcoming book from Methuen, The Theatre of Martin Crimp.

In the third volume of The Cambridge History of British Theatre (2004), editor Baz Kershaw initiates his chapter ‘Alternative Theatres, 1946–2000’ with a short discussion of ‘contesting terms’ used by commentators to describe theatre outside the mainstream in the second half of the twentieth century. Kershaw's discussion serves as a necessary preface to ground his use of multiple historiographical strategies to address the subject with necessary brevity. But teasing out the terminology used to describe alternative theatre remains a fascinatingly complex task, constitutive of precisely the issues at stake in the variant historiographical approaches to the post-war period. Using a genealogical approach inspired by Foucault, and drawing on first-person interviews with artists who worked with alternative theatre companies such as Joint Stock/Out of Joint, Gay Sweatshop, and Women's Theatre Group/The Sphinx across the closing decades of the twentieth century, Sara Freeman analyzes the branching relationships of these terms, arguing the need to develop useful rather than funerary or bewildered historiographical approaches to the 1980s and 1990s. Sara Freeman is Assistant Professor of Theatre at Illinois Wesleyan University. Her research focuses on contemporary women playwrights and British alternative theatre, and she has published articles and reviews in Theatre Survey, Modern Drama, Comparative Drama, New England Theatre Journal, and Theatre Journal. Work on this article was supported by an Artistic and Scholarly Development Grant from Illinois Wesleyan University.

The economic and political transition of the old Soviet Union into Putin's Russia has been given plenty of attention over the past few years, with emphasis on free markets and democratic choice much in evidence. In this essay Gregory Sporton discusses the less often considered difficulties of the social transition towards a New Russia. The role of ballet in the culture of the Soviet Union occasionally leads to some embarrassment for those who think the arts represent freedom; and here the symbolic power of the nation's most political theatre, the Bolshoi, is examined at the point of its renovation. How the company has adapted to the new political realities, to the challenge of attracting audiences, and to its own complicity with the old regime is observed against the backdrop of May Day celebrations in 2004. Gregory Sporton is Director of the Visualisation Research Unit in the Department of Art at the Birmingham Institute of Art and Design. Since 2004 he has been a frequent visitor to Russia, studying a range of aspects of Russian culture under the Soviets from ballet to architecture, education and the visual arts. His study trip in 2004 was funded by the Elisabeth Barker Fund from the British Academy.

In this article Rebecca Loukes explores the practice of German psychophysical awareness practitioner Elsa Gindler (1885–1961), whose work influenced twentieth-century performance in a range of ways, but has not previously been documented in this context. Loukes situates Gindler's training and early work amongst key early twentieth-century Gymnastik practitioners before tracing developments in her life and work, drawing from Gindler's 1926 article, her unpublished class notes, and her students' memories. She discusses what Gindler meant by cultivating a state of ‘concentration’, and how this related to breathing, tension, and relaxation, both in the studio and daily life. She then indicates how this can usefully be applied to contemporary pre-performance training or work on the ‘beginning state of the actor’. Rebecca Loukes is a practitioner, performer, and researcher in the area of actor training and psychophysical awareness. She has been training in practices derived from Gindler's work for over ten years. Her recent writing includes ‘Body Awareness in Performer Training: the Hidden Legacy of Gertrud Falke-Heller (1891–1984)’ for Dance Research Journal (in press). She is Lecturer in Performance Practice at the University of Exeter.